On ‘Diablo Mesa’
While working on my fictional story over the past year I slowly realized that I was writing a good old fashioned thriller, like the books I’d read as a young middle-schooler by Clive Cussler, Nelson DeMille, and Dale Brown, not to be confused with Dan Brown who I read later in high school. But I had a problem - I haven’t been reading many thrillers lately so I’ve made a conscious effort to read more. Diablo Mesa was at the top of my list. I came across Preston & Child’s book on The Observer substack. The Observer wrote that the book centered on the Roswell crash and that the authors included ‘familiar tropes’ regarding the UFO topic. Since my thriller involves UFOs, I wanted to read something similar to see how the authors wrote about it, to see what I liked and disliked about their writing and what I could learn from it.
SPOILER ALERT
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SPOILER ALERT ***
Freytag’s Pyramid - The Structure of Story. MORE.
Exposition & Inciting Incident
Diablo Mesa is set in New Mexico and follows two protagonists: archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI agent Corrie Swanson. Kelly is hired by billionaire entrepreneur Lucas Tappan to lead an archaeological dig of the Roswell site to uncover once and for all if something extraterrestrial crashed there in July 1947. As soon as the team starts digging, they uncover two bodies dated to 1947, both with gunshot wounds to the head, their face and fingers burned off by acid to hide their identity. Kelly gives Corrie Swanson a call to investigate the homicides. Further investigation reveals a strange device buried with the bodies, identified later as a ‘dial-a-yield’ which was used to dial in the explosive power of the hydrogen bomb. Swanson’s investigation reveals that the two bodies were Soviet spies who had gotten their hands on the dial-a-yield device through moles working at Los Alamos, the once-secret city where America’s top scientists developed the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project and later the hydrogen bomb.
Rising Action
A member of the team, Lucas Bitan, who formerly worked for SETI and claims to have been abducted disappears while searching for the craft in a new location.
The shadowy Agent Lime - CIA? FBI? - kills Swanson’s superior, Agent Morwood, then destroys the bodies recovered at the dig site and other physical evidence.
Kelly, Tappan and the rest of the team realize, like Bitan, that the original dig site is just the point where something slammed into the earth and then ricocheted, possibly coming to rest elsewhere. The team resumes their dig at the real crash site. Just as they uncover a strange magnetic disturbance and a green glow emanating from the ground, black helicopters descend on their position and a team of heavily armed soldiers kill one of the team and take the rest into custody.
Climax & Falling Action
Kelly and Tappan are brought to a nearby abandoned military base which conceals the location of another base hidden deep underground. Here the team is introduced to the top-secret paramilitary organization Atropos which had been watching their progress and foiling any attempt at uncovering the truth about extraterrestrials since 1947.
Colonel Rush, leader of Atropos, outlines the history of the organization. Atropos was formed out of a need to contain atomic secrets leaking from Los Alamos and other top-secret facilities being infiltrated by Soviet spies. When something crashed at Roswell in 1947, an Atropos detachment from Los Alamos was the first on the scene. Atropos discovered a crashed alien craft and was able to move it to the abandoned military base and spent the next 75 years trying to understand the craft’s technology. Rush and his organization believe the craft is proof of an advanced alien race that threatens Earth as the craft appears highly hostile and neutralizes anything that steps too close. Atropos’s main purpose is to protect Earth from this hostile alien race, even if that means silencing anyone who seeks to make contact or gets too close to the truth. The green-glowing device uncovered by Kelly’s team, a sphere within a cube, is accidentally reunited with the recovered craft during a wild rescue by Nora’s brother Skip and Swanson. When the device activates the craft, Rush executes the base’s self-destruct mechanism and the base is destroyed after the team escapes safely.
Resolution & Denouement
Three months later, Kelly, Tappan, Swanson and Skip find themselves at Area-51. A General Greyburn - who doesn’t identify his agency - unveils the perfectly intact alien craft now housed in the top-secret military installation at Groom Lake. Greyburn gives some more background on the rogue Atropos organization which operated without oversight since the 1940s and were responsible for the death of the Soviet spies located at the original crash site. Attempts at understanding the craft have succeeded due to the the return of the cube, or the ‘brain’, which disabled the craft’s defenses and unveiled it’s true purpose. The craft is one of many probes sent from a distant star system by an extinct alien race over ten million years ago just before their planet was consumed by an unknown force. The probe was damaged in the trip and ultimately came to rest on Earth. Greyburn reiterates the danger now facing Earth, should that unknown force set it’s sights on our own planet. He recruits Kelly and Tappan to ‘disclose’ this information to key people in order to keep the planet safe.
Diablo Mesa is the third novel in Preston & Child’s Nora Kelly series. Though there are references to past escapades by Kelly and Swanson, Preston & Child have made it easy for the reader to jump right in. Diablo Mesa is an engaging page-turner which accurately represents UFO lore and offers a plausible explanation for what might have happened at Roswell. The authors were careful to base the novel in scientific reality rather than ‘hokey’ alien autopsies or other sci-fi tropes. In doing so, the authors link Nora Kelly’s archaeological dig to New Mexico’s atomic history and espionage. The novel features several debates about the Fermi paradox and the ultimate question: are we alone?
Preston and Child are evidently masters of the thriller genre and Diablo Mesa features a tight plot, however some characters, including Nora Kelly, seem hollow and forgotten at times. Overall, the book is a slow build towards an action-packed climax with a satisfying resolution.
